Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

!!rant

When I worked at a previous job, they only gave out decent titles (and salaries) to upper management. Everyone else... well... I was the Domain/Sysadmin, responsible for the domain and both DCs, upgrading the physical network (plus recabling it: the MDF was a *disaster*), as well as all backups, migrations, printers, servers, and workstations/lappys in the building, plus pushing software, antivirus, updates, security policies, etc. I had complete access to everything, and ofc was responsible for everything. Nothing on my network caused anyone (else) any trouble except one particular printer I wasn't able to replace. Also, nothing new appeared on my network without me noticing and tracking it down.

But my official title? "IT Assistant".
I made $11/hr.

Worth it? Take a flying leap into an overflowing outhouse during the height of a Vegas summer if you even begin to think so.

I eventually managed to switch to a developer position, and (after several attempts) got a ~$5/hr raise. The girl they replaced me with in IT with some ditz who had never installed an OS before, didn't know what the BIOS was, and couldn't figure out why a monitor... plugged into itself... wasn't working. Things went downhill from there.

TLDR: Small family owned finance business woes as the “you-do-everything-now” network/sysadmin intern

Friday my boss, who is currently traveling in Vegas (hmmm), sends me an email asking me to punch a hole in our firewall so he can access our locally hosted Jira server that we use for time logging/task management.

Because of our lack of proper documentation I have to refer to my half completed network map and rely on some acrobatic cable tracing to discover that we use a SonicWall physical firewall. I then realize asking around that I don’t have access to the management interface because no one knows the password.

Using some lucky guesses and documentation I discover on a file share from four years ago, I piece together the username and password to log in only to discover that the enterprise support subscription is two years expired. The pretty and useful interface that I’m expecting has been deactivated and instead of a nice overview of firewall access rules the only thing I can access is an arcane table of network rules using abbreviated notation and five year old custom made objects representing our internal network.

An hour and a half later I have a solid understanding of SonicWallOS, its firewall rules, and our particular configuration and I’m able to direct external traffic from the right port to our internal server running Jira. I even configure a HIDS on the Jira server and throw up an iptables firewall quickly since the machine is now connected to the outside world.

After seeing how many access rules our firewall has, as a precaution I decide to run a quick nmap scan to see what our network looks like to an attacker.

The output doesn’t stop scrolling for a minute. Final count we have 38 ports wide open with a GOLDMINE of information from every web, DNS, and public server flooding my terminal. Our local domain controller has ports directly connected to the Internet. Several un-updated Windows Server 2008 machines with confidential business information have IIS 7.0 running connected directly to the internet (versions with confirmed remote code execution vulnerabilities). I’ve got my work cut out for me.

It looks like someone’s idea of allowing remote access to the office at some point was “port forward everything” instead of setting up a VPN. I learn the owners close personal friend did all their IT until 4 years ago, when the professional documentation stops. He retired and they’ve only invested in low cost students (like me!) to fill the gap. Some kid who port forwarded his home router for League at some point was like “let’s do that with production servers!”

At this point my boss emails me to see what I’ve done. I spit him back a link to use our Jira server. He sends me a reply “You haven’t logged any work in Jira, what have you been doing?”

Facepalm.

So, a few weeks ago I asked you guys what would you do if you were to quit your current job. I attempted a start-up with an old "friend" of mine.

He was very enthusiastic and hardworking at the beginning. However he received a job offer from somewhere and told me that he would work there just until we found the company officially and then quit and work full time on the project.

Well... I put around 300 hours into the project and developed the system, did most of my part according to the plan but the guy didn't deliver anything.

Turned out he had another secret partner whom he first introduced me as his mentor. I had my suspicions and suddenly shut down API servers, project management domain and mail server. Suddenly the quiet guy called me asking if I was alright and everything was fine.

Then, nothing happened. He went radio silence until I called him last night and he picked up the phone drunk and mumbled something like "I'm aware of you being a victim" then went to "you're passive aggresive" or something like that and I said nothing, just hung up.

I think you can figure out what went down on the other side and I'd like to hear your scenarios.

PS: now I have another start-up idea: I'm gonna pick up a flamethrower and burn the world while laughing histerically. Anyone who'd like to join is welcome.

Funniest meeting ever!

Some years ago, there was the regular department meeting where useless news from upper management were handed down. The team I was in was also there: team lead, co-worker and me. The team lead had a new girl and was daydreaming of their nights, my co-worker wasn't quite back from the football match on the weekend, and I was playing chess on my mobile.

Department lead was blah blah blah and when can we do this on your rig? We looked at each other and instantly realised that none had been paying attention.

My co-worker was the fastest to recover and straight-facedly turned to me: "Well Fast-Nop, that's your domain."

I picked the ball up before team lead could say something: "Sure, but schedule appointment is for our lead."

Our lead couldn't contradict us and then had to negotiate a schedule while trying to find out what it was about. *LOL*

Indian Product Management community is the shittiest community for any professional domain.

Everyone is just focused on being a guru preaching shit to others when they themselves no nothing about the function or possess any significant skill(s) to perform at their job.

A bunch of bozos, themselves struggling to stay afloat, are saving others. Fucking hilarious.

What makes this worse is that the entire community is so inclined towards "cracking the interview" and landing a job.
Instead what they should be focusing on is teaching them younglings what the role is and how to develop the right skill set. More importantly why the role exist in the first place.

That way, they will automatically land a good gig and solve critical user problems.

No wonder, most products these days are bloated with garbage and PMs are only focused on engagement, retention, and more fancy buzzwords which make absolutely no sense.

I'm a "published" freelance dev!

Last night I made my first web application available to the internet. It's an internal enterprise management system for a small non-profit.

It's running on a single $6 a month digitalocean droplet, and the domain is $12 a year, so yearly cost for them is absolutely rock bottom.

It's written in asp.net 6.0 razor pages, nginx reverse proxy, certbot for HTTPS certificates, fail2ban for ssh protection (ssh login is via ssl keys), entity framework with MySQL.

The site itself has automatic IP banning based on a few parameters like login spam, uses JWT tokens, and is fully secured.

All together, it's a lot of value for about $100 a year.

I bought hosting and domain last year, I uploaded my site and left it for months. Last month I logged onto my webhost's user panel and the "login to cpanel" option of my hosting directed me to someone else's premium hosting, I realised it late and I had already deleted whole of the WP site as I presumed it was mine. I left the database intact, reached out to the domain owner getting the info via whois, surprisingly he is was all fine losing his merchant navy academy website.

However, I WAS NOT FINE because I am not fucking expecting my webhost to give someone access to my hosting, just like I got access to his.

Been two weeks and they are unable to fix it and I am pissed off. I had no urgent need but I WANT ACCESS WHEN I WANT.

They are not as big as GoDaddy but they are a reputed hosting provider in my country with nice and fancy WP domain etc management portal and everything. I never expected this from then. How the fuck would they let this happen.

When management can not comprehend that hosting is separate from the domain.

Full stack developer.

I know what it's supposed to mean, but I feel like it gives discredit to the devs who perfect their area (frontend, backend, db, infrastructure). It's, to me, like calling myself a chef because I can cook dinner..

The depth, analysis and customization of the domain to shape an api to a website is never appreciated. The finicle tweaks on the frontend to make those final touches. Then comes a brat who say they are full stack, and can do all those things. Bullshit. 99.9% of them have never done anything but move data through layers and present it.

Throw these wannabes an enterprise system with monoliths and microservices willy nelly, orchestrate that shit with a vertical slice nginx ssi with disaster recovery, horizontal scaling, domain modeling, version management, a busy little bus and events flowing all decimal points of 2pi. Then, if you fully master everything going on there, I believe you are full stack.

Otherwise you just scraped the surface of what complexities software development is about. Everyone who can read a tutorial can scrape together an "in-out" website. But if your db is looking the same as your api, your highest complexity is the alignment of an infobox, I will laugh loud at your full stack.

And if you told me in an interview that you are full stack, you'd better have 10+ years experience and a good list of failed and successful projects before I'd let you stay the next two minutes..

DigitalOcean, beyond doubt

You might argue that having everything in a single place is bad, but having domain management right next to my servers is really nice. Spinning up new VMs with just a few clicks, and then being able to take it down again five minutes later is a blessing.

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

First off murphy is a bitch. Week started off good, nothing bad happening then friday night came and i get an email about a site being down. Ok check it out real quick, cert is expired. No real big deal just a 20 minute fix, didn't bother me that i didn't get an expiry alert. Now is where murphy decided to be the biggest fucking bucktoothed cocksucker, generate a csr for a wildcard domain using an existing key and sent it off when i get it back the private key doesn't match the cert. Again ok maybe i fucked up, generate a selfsigned cert no fucking problem. Contact support to see if they have an idea. Oh now is when it gets fun, the fucking dumbass preceded to tell me how i didn't know what i was doing and how i just had to generate a csr and private key at the same time after i explained to the bastard that I've already tested it with a selfsigned cert. (How does this fucker have a job) By now apparently i was pissed off enough to scare murphy's pansy ass away cause i told the fucker to refund my money, got a list of 30 subdomains and setup letsencrypt on it. Now the part on this that is fucking hilarious is that it took me damn near 24 hours to be called a fucking idiot from a guy that doesn't know his ass between a hole in the fucking ground and 30 minutes of being pissed off more than i have been since i took anger management classes in the 9th grade to say fuck it and switch.

Friend and I work on some side hustle. He does most of the content work, I just manage the tech stuff and pay for infrastructure. Domain renewal is upcoming too, so yeah...

He has refused to adopt project management methodologies and task tracking tools multiple times and it's becoming a real problem since I am paying for infrastructure and there are no plans for generating income. There was, but it's vaguely defined and I have no fucking idea what he's working on. I ask, but it's always vague AF.

I have no idea where this thing is going and I barely have time to work on it. Two weeks before I am writing exams, he asks me to urgently help with a project he's behind on due to power outages. I just fucking can't, I have too much other things on my plate right now.

Gonna have to have a sitdown, I can't keep spending money like this and not have a damn roadmap for planning things.

Fucking Windows Servers, I just wanted to set a login timeout of a few minutes after several unsuccessful login attempts.

(Windows Active Directory for Domains and shit is installed - just an FYI (otherwise this would be slightly easier))

Steps:
- Go to Group Policy Management
- Navigate to your domain in a policy tree
- Right click "default policies" and select edit in the right click dropdown.
(Why not just fucking double click and edit it them in the convenient right-side window? Because fuck you!)
- Navigate another god damn policy tree
(And it's not obvious, it's under Windows Settings... Ok that makes sense, but there are so many nests.. Fuck me)
- And only now can you edit the "Account lockout duration" field

Windows Servers are a pain.. This actually isn't completely horrible, but it gets really annoying, because literally everything here is hidden in weird places behind thousands of click navigations and in between that there's some shit sandwhich UX.

A year of analysis and """agile""" development.

And now they changed the name of the main domain entity.

It's like to pass from a software for banana management to apple management.

THE ENTIRE CODE IS FULL OF THE "BANANA" KEYWORD, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!!!!

I use fucking GoDaddy to manage my domains, just cause, whatever, who cares, right, it's a domain manager, they do have great support.

But everytime I login and try to find a domain, it's like 8 clicks and they try to push their website builder in your face and all kinds of shit.

Can I get a recommendation from a trusted devranter? I want to switch.

I use forge if that matters...

thanks.

Sus!
yesterday I bought a cool domain in namecheap, I was very lucky to find short and good one for my case.

Today (at weekends!!!!) I receive a letter:
>Hello **redacted name**,
>
>We are contacting you from the Namecheap Risk Management Team regarding your '**redacted name account**' account.
>
>Unfortunately, your Namecheap account was flagged by our fraud screening system as requiring verification and was locked.
>
>Please follow the instructions below to get your account verified:
>
>- take a color photo of the credit card used for the payment at **redacted link**
>
>Please make sure all of the edges of the credit card are visible, and that we can clearly see the card holder's name, expiration, and last four digits of the card number. The screenshots or images of the card cannot be accepted for verification. >If the submission does not meet these requirements, we can either request to submit the details again or permanently suspend your account.
>
>- provide a valid phone number and the best time to call you (within normal business hours, US Pacific time).
>
>If we do not hear back from you within 24 hours, we will be forced to cancel your orders.
>
>We apologize for any inconvenience that may result from this process. This extra verification is done for your security and to ensure that orders are legitimate. This industry, unfortunately, has a high rate of fraudulent orders, and this sort of >verification helps us drastically reduce fraud and ensure our customers remain secure. Such documents are used for verification only and are not provided to third parties in any way. Account verification is a one-time procedure, after your account >is verified, you will never face this issue again.
>
>Looking forward to your reply.
>
>---------------
>Dmitriy K.
>Risk Management
> Namecheap, Inc.

what if I did not notice it in 24 hours? It is the weekend for god's sake! People usually rest until monday.
They would what, cancel order and scalpel it to super high price?!
I have some doubts if the request is trully having anti fraudulent origins.

What if I used digital visa card? How was I supposed to photo it?

And the service they provided for photoing accepts only photos from web camera. I was lucky that I bought recently web camera with high enough amount of pixel power and manual focus. What if I did not?

That's all really SUS!
The person can not notice the letter within 24 hours time frame until the morning, when it would be already too late.

okay. Just had an interview for a web application engineer role. It was a catastrophe. Basically, they are taking care only of things I was never worked with, like certification management, ansible deployments, bash scripting. ?? What? Like, what the hell? Guys, I can make you a nice javascript game, or laravel website, eventually mount the routers and switches, configure and automate the networks, but certs... for me ssl is just an extra checkbox when I'm buying a new domain. I asked the recruiter like 5 times, please tell me what the hell is the role about, he doesn't knew... I think, I'll just give up this applying for a jobs stuff, and stay maintenance engineer, dig into plc-s and etherCat even more and forget the IT career completely...

guide to make successful software house company for future me:

1.find shortest domain name with code / star / best / it / super / ai / - whatever banger word you find
2. parse companies work board / linkedin jobs
3. parse people profiles
4. setup email server and create fake linkedin profiles that match jobs and candidates so company looks big
5. fake c-level management so company looks big
6. spam likes and create posts generated by ai from multiple profiles
7. spam invitations to people that match job descriptions and to people working within companies posting jobs
8. offer fake candidates that match job description
9. find real but less promising candidates and offer them the job
10. tell that fake candidate is no longer available but you have someone better

success

Currently having very funny project lead, who gives on the spot estimates for 9 years old very pathetic quality code having Android app in security domain. Memory leaks, bad practices, typos, CVEs etc. you name it we have it in our source of the app.

Since 5-6 sprints of our project, almost 50% of user stories were incomplete due to under estimations.

Basically everyone in management were almost sleeping since last 7-8 years about code quality & now suddenly when new Dev & QA team is here they wanted us to fix everything ASAP.

Most humourous thing is product owner is aware about importance of unit test cases, but don't want to allocate user stories for that at the time of sprint planning as code is almost freezed according to him for current release.

Actually, since last release he had done the same thing for each sprint, around 18 months were passed still he hadn't spared single day for unit testing.

Recently app crash issue was found in version upgrade scenario as QAs were much tired by testing hundreds of basic trivial test cases manually & server side testing too, so they can't do actual needful testing & which is tougher to automate for Dev.

Recently when team's old Macbook Pros got expired higher management has allocated Intel Mac minis by saying that few people of organization are misusing Macbooks. So for just few people everyone has to suffer now as there is no flexibility in frequent changing between WFH & WFO. 1 out of those Mac minis faced overheating & in repair since 6 months.

Out of 4 Devs & 3 QAs, all 3 QAs & 2 Devs had left gradually.

I think it's time to say goodbye 😔

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

I like the people I work with although they are very shit, I get paid a lot and I mostly enjoy the company but..

Our scrum implementation is incredibly fucked so much so that it is not even close to scrum but our scrum master doesn't know scrum and no one else cares so we do everything fucked.

Our prs are roughly 60 file hangers at a time, we only complete 50% of our work each sprint because the stories are so fucked up, we have no testers at all, team lead insists on creating sql table designs but doesn't understand normalisation so our tables often hold 3 or 4 sets of data types just jammed in.

Our software sits broken for months on end until someone notices (pre release), our architecture is garbage or practically non existent. Our front end apps that only I know the technology have approaches dictated by team lead that has no clue of the language or framework.

Our front end app is now about 50% tech debt because project management is so ineffectual and approaches are constantly changing. For instance we used to use view models for domain transfer objects... Now we use database entities, so there is no commonality between models but the system used to have shared features relying on that..sour roles and permissions are fucked since a role is a page regardless of the pages functionality so there is no ability to toggle features, but even though I know the design is fucked I still had to implement after hours of trying to convince team lead of it. Fast forward a few months and it's a huge cluster fuck to enforce.

We have no automated testing of any sort or manual testing in place.

I know of a few security vulnerabilities I can nuke our databases with but it got ignored.

Pr reviews are obviously a nightmare since they're so big.

I just tried to talk to scrum master again about story creation since any story involving front end ui as an aspect of it is crammed in under one pointed story as sub tasks, essentially throwing away any ability to calculate velocity. Been here a year now and the scrum master doesn't know what I mean by velocity... Her entire job is scrum master.

So anyway I am thinking about leaving because I like being a developer and it is slowly making me give up on doing things to a high standard and I have no chance of improving things, but at the same time the pay is great and I like the people.

Having to sort out the domain and hosting arrangements and dns management as the client has no clue where anything is or who owns what, and the previous web developer is intentionally not giving a fuck.

Having a tight deadline and management keeps on adding developers with zero domain knowledge to get it done.

You should have seen my managers face when i asked him if he bakes a cake twice as fast if he doubles his ovens temperature.

I'm a fool.

Trying to delete local version of domain account:
Supposed to use command:
net user [username] /delete

Tried:
net user "domain\user" /delete

Didn't work, came up with help which said an option was net user [/delete] [/domain]
So I decided to try:
net user "user" /delete /domain

... "The request will be processed at a domain controller for domain domain.local.

The command completed successfully."

Well FUCK

So now the user's account has been deleted on AD, trying to restore it but AD management tools aren't picking up AD's object so I can't find the tombstone.

SHIITTTTTTTTT :((

TL;DR: I've fucked a user's account and can't find what I need to fix it.

Moral: Don't be a fool like me.

Should I take up the job offer of *capgemini* for the domain, infrastructure management services ( IMS-cloud)?
p.s. I'm a bachelor of engineering in computer science

i am having a feeling that getting into software branch of it industry might be a wrong decision. in my college years, i got to explore different domains in tech :

1. software development : frontend tech , backed tech, mobile tech : somethings i and a million other people know

2. os and internal softwares : os, compilers, processor coding , chip manufacturing etc : don't know what this industry is known but we devs rarely go that deep in the hole

3. the network industry : computer networks , topologies, packets, data transfers etc. again not sure what this industry is but 4g/5g brands/ cisco seems to making a lot of money with this

4. cloud computing, devops, data etc : i guess some backend devs explore this domain too.

5. ai/ml data sciences/web3 : the new fad

6. biotech :?? don't know anything about this at all

7. graphics/management/qa : the other associated sisters of software dev. they are seeing a similar recession

8... ans so on.

i chose the 1st one in my undergrad as my career and now regretting this i am thinking of doing masters to fix my mistake and take a job in some other industry that is still blooming and has a future for sustaining a recession for atleast 30 years.

so any suggestions/experiences?

TL;DR how much do I charge?

I'm freelancing for the first time; regularly, I get paid a salary.

I'm freelancing as a donation: the hours I put into this work directly translate to deductions in my tax. I don't get paid any money directly.

I'm doing some web-based enterprise software for an organization. Handling the whole process from writing responsive front-end code to setting up the server and domain for them and even managing myself. So full stack plus dev ops.

My normal salary is $31 an hour and at work I do less. I largely do maintenance for existing applications plus some very minor new systems design. I don't do any server management (different team) and I damn well didn't buy the domain names for my company. So I think it's safe to say I'm taking on a drastically larger role in this freelance gig.

My moral dilemma is the organization will basically say yes to any price - because they don't pay it, the government will (up until the point I pay 0 taxes, I suppose)

I've done some minor research on what other freelancers charge for somewhat similar things and I get pretty wildly varying results. I've seen as low as $20/hr but I really doubt the quality of such a service at that price.

I'm thinking around $50 USD an hour would be a fair price. For even further reference besides my actual salary, I will say that I am in a urban / suburban part of Florida, where developers are very hard to find locally.

Is $50 too high? Too low? This is a very complicated system with (frankly excessive) security practices and features. Before this they had a handful of excel spreadsheets in a OneDrive folder.

It is currently 5:30 AM, I've been trying to upgrade a server by one single major OS release for the last 3.5 hours. All major apps were no issue, except one.

Redmine.

That thing runs on Ruby.

Ruby, as it turns out, doesn't really like the way Debian handles package management.

And now, I have Redmine that, even if I completely uninstall / reinstall, won't start

I went down several rabbit holes, trying to operatively find what the issue is. But I never got to the key issue.

Fuck ruby. Fuck Redmine. Fuck nothing-saying error messages. Fuck bundle. Fuck gem. Fuck it all.

I'm redirecting the Redmine domain onto the server backup I've made. Upgrading that thing is a nightmare.

Maybe now I can finally go to bed...